Parcels return with new album ‘Live: Vol 2’: ‘we wanted to let loose and go into the world of dance music’

Parcels have announced they will return with new album Live Vol.2, which sees the Aussie group continue to break new ground.

The first live album from the group was released in 2020 and saw them in full flight during a performance at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studio, but this second effort takes things straight to their natural home – the dancefloor.

It captures the sound of 12 tracks – including five new efforts – which were recorded live by the band at Le Palace, a renowned nightclub in Paris’ 9th arrondissement. They include ‘Reflex – from Le Palace, Paris’, the first track which is released today.

“I think after the album we wanted to let loose a little bit and really go into the dance music world,” drummer Anatole ‘Toto’ Serret told Rolling Stone UK.

“We were coming off the Day/Night record, our second album and I think we wanted to celebrate because we had been touring a lot, but also because we’ve had a soft spot for blending songs into other songs. Naturally then, it kind of ended with this idea of let’s record it in a club.”

Serret added that there was also an original plan to record the album in New York, before Paris was settled on.

“We went there straight after our European tour and it was everything we wanted,” he added.

The new record, which clocks in at over an hour, is accompanied by a film directed by longtime collaborator Carmen Crummelin which effortlessly captures the euphoria of the whole performance. In order to achieve such an effect, Crummelin opted to place cameras on the bodies of band members and crowd members.

“We really wanted to capture that feeling of being in a nightclub and getting lost to some trance-inducing music, but that’s not always the easiest thing, so Carmen got the cameras divvied out amongst some of her friends,” he explained.

And for the performance side, Serret found that the experience of touring 2021’s Day/Night directly influenced where they went next.

“We’ve always loved playing dance music live, but we had a year of touring in 2022 and the question came up of how to transform these songs into being fit for the stage and and also revisit old ones.

“We found the answer was to split the concert, we kept switching between the day record which we’d play at the front of the stage and the night part where we were all playing together at the back of the stage.”

He went on: “That worked nicely for volume two because that proved such a breakthrough, the idea of playing the night section in a club because we were able to see the energy that is created when we’re all standing 2m from each other while performing. We played for two hours with the night side pumping out and I could have played for so much longer. I was just loving it.”

Parcels’ Live Vol. 2 arrives on 20th October via Because Music.